The battle for the soul of Israel

Here’s a truth to reckon with: neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going to disappear any time soon. No one can destroy their respective claims to a sovereign state in their ancestral homeland, which happens to be the same land. Barring a cataclysmic event, there will be no river-to-sea Palestine and no Greater Israel. This is a conflict that can only be solved by territorial and political compromise. 

Such tough realism is often rejected in the global conversation. Much of the street-level human empathy for innocent victims in Gaza — a very just empathy — is marching under the banner of “Free Palestine”. The catchy and moving slogan has one main problem: whenever it appears as a standalone, it means “Eradicate Israel”. This is why ordinary Israelis, often misinformed by their government and media, mistakenly assume that every protest against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is merely a matter of antisemitism. 

Which brings me to another brutal truth: people attacking Jews on the streets or on the web simply for being Jews are antisemites. Those praising Hamas as freedom fighters are obviously sharing its antisemitic and genocidal creed. But people accusing Israel of war crimes against innocent Gazans are not antisemites, they are simply human. Both groups exist, and between them lies a huge spectrum of passionate ignorants, led by lazy and egotistic intellectuals who want to “free Palestine” and let the Jews somehow vanish or be subdued. 

A centuries-old dispute lies beneath the current Gaza conflict. As a historian, however, I strongly feel that now is not the time for history. We need to prioritise saving lives. You don’t bicker about the past while facing deadly fire. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at present too bloody for that.